We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jeanne Jaffe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jeanne, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Since my work helps me to understand my life, my feelings and the world In which I live, all of my projects are meaningful at the time I am working on them. Two in particular stand out to me. One is an installation built on a quote from T.S. Eliot’s” Four Quartets” that helped me get through difficult times in my own life. In this installation small figures in hospital gowns are suspended in space, along with rocks and vines. As the viewer approaches the installation, these figures move and recite the following poem: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
The second project is my most recent: a stop motion animation called “Alice in Dystopia”. It is a retelling of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 “Alice in Wonderland” In this version, Alice and the Rabbit fall down the wrong rabbit hole into the contemporary world of 2020 with all of its environmental and societal ills. Here the characters must find a way to confront the current crises and offer hope for renewal and change.

Jeanne, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have always been interested in psychology, literature, history, and culture. My multi-disciplinary artistic work involves sculpture, installation, stop motion animation, sound, and sometime kinetics. I initially studied archaeology/anthropology but ended up pursuing art as my lifelong exploration. Many of my installations reinterpret children’s literature and reexamine historical figures or events. I enjoy the complexity and new meanings that can develop from these explorations and installations.
For 25 years I was a Professor at The University of Arts in Philadelphia in the Fine Arts department I also taught in China at Xian Academy of Fine Arts where the Terra Cotta Warriors are located in a tomb site. By living near China’s amazing archeological sites, I was brought full circle back to my interest in antiquity
I moved to Florida 5 years ago and now have a studio in Miami at The Collective 62 in North Miami. I am also the Coordinator of International programming at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts where I can share my interest in exploring art, literature, history, and cultures.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My goal in the creative journey is to discover and explore the unexamined, unknown, and unrecognized parts of my own internal world and also aspects of the external world that I feel need to be reexamined and addressed. The act of creating and discovery transforms me as a person and helps me to develop more deeply. Consequently for me making art is a spiritual practice. My goal in my creative process is for my work to access my deepest potential and to help me to develop into being the person who I want to be and to better understand the world and my place within it. Creating art is a vehicle for me to explore the world and to learn and investigate and create something that has meaning to me and to share it with others, hoping that it will echo something buried in themselves and encourage and inspire them to grow as well.

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I think artists explore the unknown and take risks in their work that often can be a bit unnerving, but in the end it makes life very rewarding. This risk taking behavior and learning to live with the discomfort of the unknown is the part of the struggle as a creative that everyone can learn from and apply to their own lives to enrich their experiences. Art making can develop the capacity to live with ambiguity, complexity, not knowing, and being open to your undiscovered capabilities.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jeannejaffe.net
• Instagram: @jeannejaffe
• Facebook: jeanne jaffe
• Linkedin: jeanne jaffe
• Other: vimeo – jeanne jaffe